Love after Death, Part I:

Healing Heartbreak in the Wake of Grief

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak

Whispers the oe’r fraught heart and bids it break.

William Shakespeare, 

Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3                                                                                   

                

                                                                                                                                                                There is more than one kind of grief, just as there is more than one kind of love.

Regardless of its brand or flavor, love is inextricably entangled with grief. Love and grief are the light and the shadow, the yin and the yang, the joy and the pain of the human heart—alternately and simultaneously. And love is not a noun you pursue but a verb you do. Likewise, grieving is active as it crawls through the messy denouement of love’s perverse rapture. You can’t modulate, minimize or mask the truth of it.

Like a terrorist, there is no negotiating with it.

Grief just is—spewing out of and sinking into the deepest chasms of your everywhere. Nothing about it is logical, linear or fair. Its gravity and gyre consume you in a torrent of swirling memories and images, flashing across your mind’s eye like the latest Netflix documentary. But not all the time.

You should be using your I-statements, Elaine.

Each new and devasting loss both absorbs and ignites the anguish of the last. That’s where I live now. In the heavy heat of a Texas summer for the ages, a fresh, raw grief is leaching into my flesh and out of every pore. It’s the saline ache of a broken heart, the romantic kind. Oozing into my fall and imploding on my emotional terrain like an Oppenheimer mishap, it has debrided my barely healed wounds with the force of a tsunami.

Yes, this grief is different, as am I.

This is my fifth year of missing my late son, Elliot, forever 26. I have been a single mom for more than two decades, but within the chaos of the past 12 months, I said yes to what I thought was unexpected and meant-to-be love. Granted, I had no idea how vulnerable and brittle my heart would be. It was a breath-seizing surprise—a whirlwind tornado that whisked me out of my dank, dark cave, my deep rancid hole—the kind they sing about in the opening credits of The Wire.

How Elliot loved that show—before I even knew it existed.

Yet this new love was old. This prickly paramour was a prodigal suitor—an actor, teacher and reluctant musician simply looking for a place to be. So, he retrieved me—seemingly out of the blue from where he had left me in the last century. Oh, the circle of life. We’ll call him Mikhail for these purposes. How I love all things Chekhov.

How I loved Mikhail—in the last century, too, in the wings and between the flats of a Dallas theatrical landmark. These were our thespian-adjacent salad days, our first jobs out of school in a place where artists made magic for a living. We engaged in an intoxicating flirtation, but after a particularly festive party, at the end of a particularly captivating night, he announced: “I am so sorry to tell you this, Elaine, but I am engaged. I’m confused . . . and I don’t see how this is going to work. I can’t see you anymore.”

Needless to say, he broke my heart. Shattered it and stomped on it. Then, he vanished, dissolved into the ether. So, you may understand why I thought twice about stepping back into this dangerously familiar territory 35 years later.

Three times probably would have been prudent.

As the wisdom gurus say, the universe keeps sending us lessons until we learn them—even if it takes sending the exact same one again. By now, I should be at the dissertation stage. Where’s my diploma, anyway? And yet, there he was, returning like a virtual Halley’s comet in my social media sky.

“Hi Elaine, Happy Monday! How’s Dallas these days? It’s been a minute, huh?” began Mikhail’s cheeky Facebook messenger missive. “I’ve recently retired from teaching high school theatre (25 years, whew!) and am living in the Midwest. Not my first choice but I have family here, so it’s good  😉 as a home base. This may be a little odd, so forgive me if it is, but I’m going to be in Dallas during the last week in April and was wondering if you might be interested in getting some coffee or tea or a margarita or wine (covering all the beverage bases here)? I would love to see you and catch up with you if you have any time.”

Sweet but, yes, odd. Should have been a clue.

When I received this note, the memories of us still cracked across my memory like jagged fragments of a shattered stained-glass window. So long ago. I was such a different person

I had been married, had two children and divorced. I had lost my son Elliot, my mother, my father, my only cousin, my only aunt, my sister to a mental break, my dear cat Patches, and my precious dog Izzy. Not to mention COVID lockdown, job disruptions, home relocations, emotionally abusive relationships, my son Ian’s move into an apartment, and myriad other challenges I faced alone.

Golly, I was a prize.

Still, I was curious and felt that familiar ache in my stomach and that black hole in my heart. Those intense, soulful brown eyes, long unkempt hair that unfurled down his back like unspun silk, and that mischievous sense of humor that made me laugh without thinking.

Plus, perhaps, the codependent attraction of detachment.

It’s amazing how social media can pry open doors that your heart closed so long ago. Mikhail sprinkled his likes and loves across all my Facebook posts like a tipsy Peter Pan, and it did the trick. He told me he was touched by my writing about grief on my blog. It was a steady dopamine drip that engaged and charmed me all over again. Yet I did ask during our first phone conversation:

“So, Mikhail, I have to ask. Are you still married?”

“No, I’m single. Two marriages, ended . . . ,” he paused, and I let the awkward air hang there, trying not to fill the space. I could hear him breathing through the phone. “They are not stories I like to tell,” he continued. “In fact, my heart is still reeling from a more recent breakup, a long-distance relationship with a veterinarian that recently ended.”

“Oh, sorry to hear that,” I said, guarded and wary. He was clearly still licking his wounds, but there was a tiny voice in my head that thought, ”I can comfort you. I can love you the way you deserve.”

Truth is I had just entered the Twilight Zone. I did not heed this clue—almost like ignoring Rod Serling standing in the corner. Grief counselor David Kessler says, “A broken heart is an open heart.” But that’s a questionable attribute when there are hidden unhealed parts that have been broken for a lifetime.

He arrived.

We had that beverage (and dinner) on a Thursday. I walked in the door of the dark, hip retro pub, my heart beating visibly through my black and white floral top, and there he stood across the room staring at me with those searingly intense eyes that drilled into my soul but also exuded a wistful discomfort.

My memory is foggy here.

We sat. He explained he was considering relocating to Dallas, but Los Angeles and the East Coast were also options. He had “contacts” there, too. I mustered some courage as I sipped my Chardonnay and said, “I was crushed when I learned about your engagement in Dallas so long ago.”

He was still, silent and focused on me with those wide, anxious eyes in the lambent candlelight. It felt kind of like a job interview in the dark. He was not a bastion of reassurance. He nodded and said, “I understand” with a sort of befuddled smirk, and then asked with disconcerting directness: “Are you open to some romance in your life now?” That startled me, but I was flattered. After dinner, we hugged for what seemed like a very long time on the sidewalk and we parted. He said he would be in touch.

From there, logistics were a little awkward but deliberate. Mikhail was living across the country with his quiet Midwestern family after a complicated departure from his last city of residence in Texas. So, we reforged our tenuous connection long-distance. We giggled for endless hours sprawled across our respective couches like giddy teenagers on old-timey rotary telephones wired to the wall. Almost instantly, this reconnection felt like a fantasy come true—unfolding with the velocity of one of those cloying romances on the Hallmark Channel.

I should have gone with my gut.

My mild resistance was melting, however, under his savory landslide of emails, phone calls, texts, videos, WhatsApps, and the virtual seduction of curated Spotify playlists he labeled “not so subtle.” I was actually starting to feel glimmers of joy.

Or was that my traumatized nervous system kicking in?

Next came frenetic weekend visits back and forth—and then after a month, we were planning his move. In with me. He was ostensibly retired from teaching but hoped to reinvent his theatrical career on a shoestring. And I said OK—eagerly so. Another wise aphorism comes to mind: “When someone asks for a cup of water, you don’t have to give them the ocean.” But I thought it was love, so I did.

Mikhail was funny, polite, silly, smart, frugal, great with assigned tasks around the house, efficient at packing for a move, an encouraging exercise partner, and the most compulsively punctual human being I had ever met. He laughed at my jokes like he actually thought I was funny—and I at his. However, after about three months on our runaway long-distance train, hairline fractures were beginning to appear in his carefully constructed façade.

Though I anticipated our monthly visits with great fervor, Mikhail often seemed vaguely irritated. In fact, he would arrive from driving cross-country from his Midwestern town grumpy and testy, like Willy Loman returning after a week on the road. I remember on one particular visit, I ran up to him outside as he pulled up like the girl dashing across a meadow in slow motion and hugged him hard, but he recoiled with mild disgust. I was shocked and hurt.

“Hey, I’m exhausted, “ he said as he stepped around me. “Let me just sit down, will ya?”

“I have been so excited, and there were all your texts . . . aren’t you happy to see me?” I asked with tears welling. “Have I done something wrong? I know you are tired. It’s such a long drive. I have some appetizers and a cold beer waiting here for you . . .”

He could not tolerate my disappointment, either.

“Yea, yea. I guess I’m just a total f-up,” he erupted suddenly. “You hate me. I hate myself. I am a loser. I guess you deserve better, don’t you?”

These remarks pierced me like arrows, and scared me, too. I did not know how to reassure him. Mikhail never really acknowledged my emotional state. I guess it was too hard regulating his own. I became increasingly anxious and confused. What was this, anyway? My questions and attempts to calm him felt loving at best and innocuous at worst. I so wanted him to feel at ease, so I began walking on eggshells. I was trying so hard to avoid the landmines, the triggers and the volatile regressions.

But I ended up losing myself along the way.

End of Part I. More to come . . .